December 2016
Please forward to other interested parties.
Project Entry Questions will auto-copy starting in 2017
For
better data quality and ease of use, throughout December our HMIS team will be
setting all Balance of State (BOS) projects to automatically copy entry
questions from one project entry to another project entry if it falls within 21
days from the previous project entry. Enabling this feature for each project
will happen in phases with a goal to have all Balance of State projects done by
the start of the new year
Which projects and records are affected?
Auto-copying can only be done between projects within the same
agency or that are part of the same data sharing group. Only entry answers (not
exit answers) will copy over to a new project record. If the last exit was more
than 21 days from the new entry, the answers will not cascade and all entry
answers will need to be answered from scratch as they are now. Check Your Auto-Copied
Data
We will post a tutorial document on how to use this feature on
our HMIS webpage.
Your team at Commerce is looking forward to a new year of
reporting and data gathering. Expect to see changes to how we gather housing
inventories, Point in Time counts and expenditure data this year. We’ll be in
touch throughout December, January and February about how to check your
inventories and PIT counts in Clarity. You’ll get trained soon on how to enter
PIT data in the new HMIS. Please contact your local PIT coordinator or Ian Kinder-Pyle
(email) for any
questions you have about this year’s PIT count, housing inventory updates or
expenditure reporting. PIT Count
trainings will be posted on the website soon.
We
recommend that you don’t enter fake or test client data into HMIS. If you find you
have a need to do so you have two options: you can contact our HMIS team to request use of our training site or if you need to use HMIS
please follow the procedures outlined below:
- Keep
a list of Unique Identifiers so that when you are finished with your testing
you can email any Commerce team member with a list of fake clients to delete
within 14 calendar days;
- In
the First Name field in Clarity, add the word “Test”;
- In
the Alias field in Clarity, add either your County name or the three-letter
prefix of your username.
Commerce
will clean up data on a regular basis, and we’ll use the values entered above
to quickly ensure no fake or test data is being reported as valid. If you have
valid data with “Test” for a first name and/or County or three-letter codes for
an Alias and find they are accidentally deleted during a regular clean up
exercise, please contact Commerce help desk and we will restore the deleted
record.
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